negative SEO question - tell me why my idea is stupid

miketpowell

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I'm a big newbie when it comes to SEO so this I figure would be a great place to ask this question.

My understanding is that over the last few years Google has rolled out a number algo changes that can penalize sites for having "bad" incoming links. Effectively giving a negative SEO weapon that could be used on competition.

Sites like complaintsboard.com that are based in some country to protect themselves from US laws are very frustrating to product owners. Really the only solution to people posting fake reviews claiming a service is fraud/scam because they are a moron have been to rank a bunch of other things above them for the brand name being defmaed. complaintsboard.com gets to just keep making ad dollars for really just being a place for morons to defame other peoples livelihood with no potential consequences.

How much money/resources would it take to "negative SEO" a site as big as complaintsboard.com into oblivion? I picture a union of product owners that all chip together money and resources to smash these sites out of the SERPs.

Please tell me why my idea is stupid and wouldn't work.
 
Complaintsboard and other websites are shitty business models for sure. Most of those sites actually recently got hit by Google, so a lot of their pages should have dropped off of the first page.

Complaintsboard is too large and well insulated to have any real effect. According to AHrefs, they have 160k backlinks on 8.9k referring domains. In my experience, penalties that come from poor backlinks (not talking penguin here, those are larger algo rollouts), are all about ratios. Google examines the overall link profile to determine whether or not links have been unnaturally built. The number of links you'd have to create to make a negative dent is definitely out of reach. In the end, the links you build would more than likely backfire and help their page rank more highly.

With that said - their individual pages that rank for brand related keywords are not all that strong. You'd have an easier time creating small websites, web 2.0s and positive PR properties and ranking those - pushing the shitty review site page to the 2nd page.
 
NormCharlton said:
With that said - their individual pages that rank for brand related keywords are not all that strong. You'd have an easier time creating small websites, web 2.0s and positive PR properties and ranking those - pushing the shitty review site page to the 2nd page.
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Thanks for the reply. This was my understanding of what is currently done. I just figured instead of 50 product owners all doing that for themselves individually if they group together they can just take down the entire thing for good.

That does sound like alot of back links for Complaintsboard - I had to ask because as a SEO newbie I don't really know what's possible in that space. When you say "out of reach" you mean even for 5-6 figure budgets it's still not possible? I like to focus on what the numbers actually would have to be. Not that I'm saying it would be viable ROI wise to spend that much. I'm just a curious as a SEO newbie. I thought spammy xRummer links could be had pretty cheap in massive quantities.
 
What @NormCharlton seems to be saying is that the amount of links needed to 'penalize' the page is too damn high (30K? 100K?) and the chance of Complaintsboard surviving the attack and coming out of it stronger is high too. It's not about money, these links are cheap - it's about effort and brittleness of the whole thing.

You're probably not the first one who got that idea. They will see your links pouring in, disavow them, tweet to Mr. Cuттs, or do whatever else they do to get rid of the inconvenience. They've probably already done before.

If you are willing to sacrifice 5-6 figure budgets for this thing, you need to go the constructive way, not the destructive one. Push their page down by populating SERPs with the properties you control. Your goal here is to get a network of authority placements for your brand name/search query that will push the Complaintsboard down to pages 3 & 4 when nobody even looks. Directory listings, press releases, paid articles, active social profiles - all that can outrank the bad review eventually. Look up "online reputation management" and go from there.

tl;dr - don't try to neg seo a big authority site with links, do something better instead.
 
miketpowell said:
Thanks for the reply. This was my understanding of what is currently done. I just figured instead of 50 product owners all doing that for themselves individually if they group together they can just take down the entire thing for good.

That does sound like alot of back links for Complaintsboard - I had to ask because as a SEO newbie I don't really know what's possible in that space. When you say "out of reach" you mean even for 5-6 figure budgets it's still not possible? I like to focus on what the numbers actually would have to be. Not that I'm saying it would be viable ROI wise to spend that much. I'm just a curious as a SEO newbie. I thought spammy xRummer links could be had pretty cheap in massive quantities.
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Well, with that kind of budget your kind of out of my expertise area. But again - with that kind of budget I would think everyone's time would be better spent creating positive PR properties rather than trying to bring down a behemoth. There isn't an exact science, no one knows Google's algorithm. There is no way to say you could bring them down with XXX,XXX links or anything like that.

Also, Google has the "disavow" tool. I can't speak to its efficiency because I've never really had to use it, but it seems like they could wipe your efforts off the map pretty easily using it.
 
Unfortunately for you, bringing down a site isn't like getting a mob together and pillaging a town. Short of injecting malware (or talking to someone that is heavily involved in hacking and neg seo), that site will be standing for a while no matter what you do. But I also want to steer clear of the directions that particular conversation can go.

The answer to your unasked question and what everyone is trying to tell you is that your strategy needs to be geared toward reputation management. You need to push your particular negative review down in the serps and get your brand ranking for your branded keywords again. One bad review on that site shouldn't be enough to tank all your hard work and reputation. Unless you're running a really shitty business, and I don't believe that you are. I think the key is to invest what you can in solid branding and rep mgmt.
 
I agree with what everyone else has said here about it probably won't be worth it doing a negative seo attack.
However what I would do in your case is focusing on getting great reviews from another site that just happens to be a google partner the site is trustpilot.com now officially noone knowes if reviews help from this site, but it does it helps rankings but more importantly it also helps with consumer trust.
also if you have a g+ local business page cutumors can review you their as well, same thing goes for facebook local pages.
if you own a product or a business and have a mailing list of your customers what I would do is shoot them a mail announcing a contest giving away something your custumoers WANT and simply make it a random pick among reviews from some of the above mentioned sites (prefrebly g+) since google owns g+, sometimes when you do google searches you will see the sites that has star ratings under the url these ratings come from the above mentioned sites and also on-site ratings, if you have a script that allows users to rate your product/company from your site.

Hope it's helpfull
and sorry for my shitty engrish :-D
 
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